What’s More Effective than Newsletter Campaigns?

Asking yourself how to boost repeat visits and reach users even when they are far away from your site? Put aside your email campaigns – try a more efficient way, i.e. push notifications. It’s an ideal solution for quick alerts about your news, discounts, or any other data. To launch push campaigns, choose one of browser push notifications tools featured in this post. As most of them are free or at least have a free plan, your budget can remain safe and sound.

First, let’s figure out what push notifications are all about. These are small, clickable messages that show up in the browser. To subscribe to them, users must give their approval by clicking “Allow” in an opt-in box when they enter your site. Once they do it, they will join your subscriber list. What’s cool about push notifications is that users don’t have to browser your site to receive them. They can hang out on any other site and will get them anyway.

TemplateMonster Experience

According to a recent research, push notification open rate can reach 50-80%. This impressive figure motivated our team to test one of push notifications tools, and today we’d like to share our experience with you. Hopefully, it will help you make the right decision about launching your own push campaign. Since February, we’ve used SendPulse, a completely free push notification service. Over a month, it brought us 49K subscribers, which is 4% of all our website visitors. The number is quite good taking into account such a short period.

To get better results, recipients were segmented by their location. Based on this segmentation, we carried out 160 campaigns (one notification sent is equal to one campaign). In total, the delivery rate was 66% with 14 887 clicks and 10K visits. As for conversion, it was 0.4% higher than the rate of our email messaging conversion. It proves that push notifications work a little better than newsletters, so they are definitely worth a try, especially for free.

Main Features of Push Notifications Tools

As a rule, browser push notifications tools are supplied with features that can provide a user-friendly experience and make campaigns more efficient. Here they are.

• Segmentation. Personalize push notifications by segmenting your audience. You divide users by different criteria, particularly their geo location, language, date, subscription page, and others. Each tool has its own criteria to segment recipients.
• A/B Testing. Make the most of your push campaigns by testing their efficiency. No more guesswork. Send different notifications to different user groups to find out which one of them brings better results.
• Analytics. Track the performance of your push campaigns in real time. Tools of this kind provide statistics on the notifications sent, received, clicked, etc. With detailed insights into your campaigns, you can improve the user engagement dramatically
• Delivery Scheduling. Send push notifications to users when the open rate is at its peak. This feature will come in handy if your subscribers live in different time zones or you need to announce a discount or new product.

Now, proceed to my selection and choose the tool that meets all your needs. For convenience, you can scan the features in checklists. If you are interested in learning more details, you can find them in underlying descriptions.

SendPulse

• Number of Subscribers – unlimited
• Number of Notifications – unlimited
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – yes
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – no

SendPulse is a completely free solution from this selection. To integrate push notifications into your site, simply add a single line of code to its HTML markup. Next, write a message with a title, choose recipients, customize the sending time, that’s all. As easy as pie. What’s cool, you can send push notifications when recipients offline. They will see them as soon after connecting to the web. There is even no need to enter your site.

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To personalize push notifications, you can divide subscribers by different criteria. They include the subscription page, region, browser type and language. For deeper segmentation, it’s also possible to divide them by the subscriber and buyer statuses through the SendPulse API.

Moreover, the tool has a user-friendly chart with real-time stats to analyze your push campaigns. It displays the number of subscribers, unsubscribed users, and sent push campaigns. You can check the details about both push notifications and each subscribed recipient individually. What SendPulse lacks is an option to export the data.

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OneSignal

• Number of Subscribers – unlimited
• Number of Notifications – unlimited
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – yes
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Chrome, Safari, Firefox
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – no

OneSignal is another good freebie of browser push notifications tools. As the setup process reportedly takes only 15 minutes, you can get started really quickly. To localize your notification content, the system can identify the language of each recipient’s device. For convenience, OneSignal allows for automatic delivery of push notifications to users.

Similar to SendPulse, this tool comes with all the essential marketing features, particularly A/B testing, segmentation, analytics, and scheduler. Segmentation lets you send personalized notifications to each visitor within a specified time frame. Thanks to integration of analytics, you can track the conversion of notifications in a real-time mode. What I personally like about OneSignal is a possibility to both import and export the data.

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PushEngage

• Number of Subscribers – up to 2,5K (free plan), up to 10K (pro), unlimited (business / enterprise plans)
• Number of Notifications – unlimited
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – no
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Chrome, Firefox (coming soon), Safari (coming soon)
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – starting at $29 per month + 15-day free trial

PushEngage offers both free and paid plans, which makes it ideal for any budget. With the help of this tool, you can implement push notifications in around 5 minutes. All you need is to embed the JavaScript code into your site. To improve your conversion, you can target notifications by users’ preferences, categories or custom segments. Keep in mind that they will be delivered in real time, even when users are away from your site.

To get higher CTR rates, you can add small custom images to your push notifications. If some of them are valid for a limited period, it’s possible to disable them on the expiry of that time. One of the PushEngage distinctive features is old notification capping available in the free plan. It allows you to set a limit on the number of notifications to show users at a given time. In such a way, they won’t be overloaded with your messages and will be less inclined to unsubscribe.

The free plan of PushEngage gives an access to all the major features, particularly segmentation, analytics, and push campaign scheduling. However, if you want to brand notifications with your own sub-domain name, this feature is locked in the free version of the tool. You’ll have to pay for a business or enterprise plan.

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MobioPush

• Number of Subscribers – unlimited
• Number of Notifications –100K (basic plan), 500K (starter plan), 3M (professional plan)
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – no
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Safari, Chrome, Firefox (coming soon)
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – starting at $19 + 14-day free trial

MobioPush is also on the list of the top push notification service providers. It provides multilingual support to notify users in their local languages. Using the tool, you can divide users into segments (groups of users) and aliases (individual users) and send them notifications based on this segmentation. Thanks to geo tagging, it’s possible to target recipients by their location.

MobioPush is integrated with plugins allowing you to send push notifications automatically when you generate new content or schedule them for any other time. To label notifications in line with your corporate identity, an option of custom branding will come in handy.

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iZooto

• Number of Subscribers – unlimited
• Number of Notifications – unlimited
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – no (coming soon)
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Chrome, Safari, Firefox
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – no

iZooto is easy to set up, taking around 5 minutes for you to go live with your push notification campaign. To track and optimize its performance, you can use a built-in campaign manager. When users are offline, notifications are stored to show up when they connect to the Internet. Thanks to custom branding options, your push notifications will be recognizable among others. For example, it’s possible to add a custom image to each of them, use your sub-domain name, etc.

To treat your subscribers individually, you can organize all the data about them into individual profiles. This intelligent system also allows you to segment your audience by the handset and location. However, if you want to get an access to 15 more filters, you’ll have to pay for an enterprise plan. Also keep in mind that iZooto doesn’t allow you to tie together push notifications with the list of your e-mail subscribers.

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WebEngage

• Number of Subscribers – 10K (free plan), 100K (professional plan), 500K (business plan), 2 M (enterprise plan)
• Number of Notifications – 1K (free plan), 10K (professional plan), 50K (business plan), 200K (enterprise plan)
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – yes
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Netscape, Opera
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – starting at $375 per month (billed annually) + 14-day free trial

WebEngage allows you to use ready-made themes or create push messages from scratch in an easy-to-use builder. Its dashboard has 4 fields to input the data to, i.e. a title, description with images and links, call-to-action button text and URL. For greater personalization, it’s also possible to add tokens (user name, discount value, etc) there. In terms of customization, you can change the font family and colors of the title, description, CTA button, window border and its background. Next, you’ll need to specify the width of the notification window and choose the spot to show it (bottom left or right).

To make notifications more contextual, you can target them based on 12 parameters. They include user’s browser, geo location, time of visiting, leave intent, number of pages viewed, and other custom rules such as cart amount, customer type, etc. To track your push campaign, there is a stats counter revealing the number of views, clicks, and CTR. Moreover, the tool supports Excel, which will come in handy for downloading notification reports.

The tool is integrated with Google Analytics, but unfortunately only in costly business and enterprise plans. So, if you want to get more detailed metrics, be ready to pay more. What’s cool, you can use a white label feature to remove the logo of WebEngage from your notifications. But what’s not so cool is that this feature is available only to users of the most expensive enterprise plan charging a monthly fee of $1,499.

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Pushwoosh

• Number of Subscribers – unlimited
• Number of Notifications – unlimited
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – yes
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes< /li>
• Browser Support – Chrome, Safari, Firefox
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – starting at $49 per month

Pushwoosh identifies languages set on subscribers’ devices and suggests the most popular ones. In such a way, you can send multilingual notifications within a single push. Feel free to save your push messages as presets in order to reuse them later as long as you want. Thanks to the feature of GeoZones, notifications can be delivered automatically, when a user enters a certain area. Its scope ranges from 50 to 1000 meters.

The tool makes it possible to segment the audience via tags and filters based on their age, location, purchase history, etc. There are 5 types of tags, but you can also create custom ones for more precise targeting in each segment. Pushwoosh provides advanced statistics showing the rate of notifications opened and user engagement. There are also stats for tags that can be viewed in a table, pie or bar chart.

While Pushwoosh offers a lot for users of paid plans, those of you who opt for a freebie can’t take full advantage of its functionality. Analytics, A/B Testing, segmentation and many other features are locked, so you won’t have a chance to launch a smart push campaign, I’m afraid.

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PushBots

• Number of Subscribers – unlimited
• Number of Notifications – 1,5M (free plan), 5M (basic plan), 20M (standard plan), unlimited (ultimate plan)
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – no
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Chrome 42
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – starting at $49 per month

PushBots requires you to spend around 10 minutes on the entire setup procedure. You can save notifications as templates, which will let you reuse them many times in the future. The tool provides an option of collaboration to let you join forces with the other team members on your push campaign. As PushBots is integrated with Twitter, you can send notifications from your Twitter timeline. While segmentation and tags are availble at no cost, an option of scheduling notifications is locked in the free plan. What’s worse, PushBots lacks an option of A/B testing.

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Jeapie

• Number of Subscribers – discussed individually
• Number of Notifications – discussed individually
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – yes
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Safari, Chrome
• Free Plan – no
• Paid Plan – price is available per request

Jeapie enables you to pre-set your push campaign and send notifications depending on the time zones of different groups of recipients. To personalize messages, you can store subscribers’ unique names, emails, phone numbers, IDs, etc. Feel free to use tags if you want to build segmented mailing lists. It’s possible to save the following data to tags: sex, age group, favorite product categories, client status, city, special offers, purchase of expensive items, etc. Jeapie makes it easy to manage the fragmented data that is constantly updating. Notifications can be delivered even to users whose browsers are closed. Unfortunately, the tool has no free plan.

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Roost

• Number of Subscribers – discussed individually
• Number of Notifications – discussed individually
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – yes
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Chrome, Safari, Firefox
• Free Plan – no
• Paid Plan – starting at $399 per month

Roost supports both on- and off-site notifications that can be customized in line with your brand. To be exact, you can add your corporate logo, site name, URL and title. For convenience, the title can be generated automatically, based on the existing content. To segment the audience, Roost uses the browser IP and some other settings such as country, city, state, and zip code. In its subscriber activity graph, you can keep track of opt-in actions, clicks and page views. To set the tool up, just copy the Roost JavaScript and paste it into your site.

The Roost feature of A/B testing is extended to multivariate testing, as it’s possible to choose more than two notification variants. The most effective option is selected and sent to your subscriber base automatically. What’s also worthy of special notice is the Bell, i.e. a gateway into your on-site notification center. It shows a list of all the untapped notifications to both subscribers and unsubscribed users. You can place the Bell either in the navigation bar or show it as an inline UI element.

With a monthly fee of at least $399, Roost is an expensive solution compared to the other tools of this category. And it also provides no free plan.

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PushCrew

• Number of Subscribers – 500 (free plan), 2K+ (premium, business, and enterprise plans)
• Number of Notifications – unlimited
• Segmentation – yes
• A/B Testing – no (coming soon)
• Analytics – yes
• Delivery Scheduling – yes
• Browser Support – Chrome, Firefox, Safari (coming soon)
• Free Plan – yes
• Paid Plan – starting at $25 per month + free trial

Here is the last solution from our roundup of browser push notifications tools. PushCrew provides a five-minute setup and allows you to reach even those users who’ve closed your site’s tab. If they want to stop receiving your notifications, a one-click unsubscribe button will come in handy. To brand your push messages, you can supply them with your custom sub-domain name. All the subsribers’ data can be embeded into your Google Analytics account. There is also a cool module to deal with abandoned carts, but it’s available only in the enterprise plan.

Unfortunately, many cool features of PushCrew haven’t been released yet. A/B testing, geo targeting, expiring notifications, drip campaign, CTR maximize, cross- and up-selling modules, - all these features have a “coming soon” status. Hopefully, it won’t take long until their release, but now you have to content yourself with somewhat limited functionality.

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Here we are. Among these browser push notifications tools, SendPulse seems to be the coolest option. It offers a full-set of must-have features completely for free, and the team of TemplateMonster can warrant its optimal performance. Check it out yourself to make sure of the veracity of these words. Have you ever used push notifications to improve interaction with your audience? What tools did you use? Share your experience with us in the comments below, please.